On the Incivility of Socialists

Forgive me if I fail to list by definition and axiom and minor premise and major all my reasons for the thoughts I express below. Those reasons have been given many times before, by me and by other men more learned and articulate than I.

It is instructive to notice that it greater part of the rudeness, the incivility, the madness in public discourse comes from the Left.

It does not matter whether they are Christian or agnostic or atheist, the socialists cannot hold a civilized conversation or debate.

This is because, ultimately, after one says “eat the rich!” one has nothing to say.

One may just call people names after that, bark at them like a foaming mad dog, sneer at one’s betters, scoff and snarl and heap disdain on people too decent to reply in kind.

If someone says, “But once we eat the rich, by what means will the society accumulate and invest capital? In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The socialist will reply, “You are a moron. I am smart. You are a reactionary. I am progressive. You are benighted. I am enlightened. I am good, because I want to kill the rich and steal their things and dash out their baby’s brains against the rocks. You are evil.” or something of the kind.

If you say, “Let us grant that I am an evil moron. How can civilization be maintained without specialization of labor, trade and industry, and the other incidental effects of private property?”

The socialist will reply, “You are a moron. I am smart. You are a reactionary. I am progressive. You are benighted. I am enlightened. I am good, because I want to kill the rich and steal their things and dash out their baby’s brains against the rocks. You are evil.” or something of the kind.

If you say, “Consider the following chart (see below). If socialism, even if at first a peaceful movement motivated by legitimate grievances imposed on exploited workingmen, has come to this throughout the entire Second World, what does that imply about the nature of socialism? What does that imply about its relation to classical liberalism?”

In case that is too many numbers for you, the bottom line is that socialism murdered one hundred ten millionmen, women, and children in the Twentieth Century.

Socialism is allegedly an economic theory on how to redistribute wealth in order to cure social injustices or defects endemic to the free market. But, if so, why does it lead to mass murder unparalleled in human history in any place it has been fully implemented?

Why does it lead to rationing, scarcity, poverty, depression, decay of the economy, metastasizing bureaucracy, loss of liberty, and loss of civility and virtue in any place it has been partially implemented?

The socialist will reply, “You are a moron. I am smart. You are not listening to my argument. You are not being fair. You are afraid to argue with me!”

You might, if in a jovial mood, answer, “Let us grant that I have all the character defects you ascribe to me. For what reason do you believe that socialism, which had proven a ghastly failure leading to mass murder of a magnitude without parallel in history, will not fail if tried again, or if implemented more rigorously?”

Him: “If we only kill another one hundred million innocent people, and inflict tyranny and misery and cruelty on countless more, this time it will work for sure!”

You: “Why will it work this time if it never worked before? Why will eliminating money from society and eliminating the incentives which produce wealth somehow create money and create wealth instead of destroying it? Why will the same behavior under the same conditions not lead to the same result?”

Him: “You. Moron. Evil. Evilly evil moron and moronically evil evildoer! You bad! Fascist! Racist! You are mean to me and I am going to cry.”

You: “Perhaps you could give me the chain of reasoning which leads to your conclusion, except without calling me an evil moron.”

Him: “You want to push crippled grandmothers in a wheelchair off a cliff!”

You: “Uh … what?”

Bizzaro: “Bizzaro am smart! Bizzaro am smarter than you!”

You: “Granted, but how does that bear on the argument? If the government enacts policies which act as an incentive uncivilized behavior, such as discouraging marriage, while at the same time deterring saving and investment by socializing costs but concentrating benefits…”

Him: “Evil! Evil! EVIL! EEE-EEVILLL!!!”

And then lather, rinse, repeat.

To be sure, I am joking. I indulge in a rather unsubtle satire of socialists I have read or have addressed, starting with Karl Marx. But I am satirizing a disturbing and persistent behavior in the intellectual life of those who lean to the Left.

They are pathologically unable to treat any opposition as an understandable or honest error, or as an alternate point of view worthy of respect. Heaping disrespect upon the opposition is not the main point of socialist rhetoric. It is the only point. That is all there is to their argument.

They have no argument. The emperor has no clothes.

To be sure, socialists come in many breeds. Some are nonviolent, and seek to undermine civilization by slow and patient legislation and educational conditioning, incremental judicial activism, and press corps to act as an informal and unarmed Thought Police.

They want the benefits of the police state without the actual need for police. They want the taxman rather than the hangman to soak the rich. They want the sheep not to stampede.

Well, I will give the partial socialists credit for yearning after a peaceful tyranny, imposed by consensus and peer pressure, where the population votes itself into its chains voluntarily, and is kept disarmed, stupefied, uneducated, porn-addicted, drugged, drunk and childless by their own psychological prison.

That is better than the revolution and the guillotine. The terror imposed by the violent socialist, with his secret police and gulags and torture rooms, are in the long run less efficient than the despair, the sheer mind-deadening hopelessness imposed by the nonviolent socialist, with his socialized medicine and cradle to grave welfare state, his hate speech laws and sensitivity training, the pornography and soccer riots and drugs and booze and mass media which keep the herd placid.

But the result is the same: the end of civilization.

The partial socialist creates and maintains a permanent underclass of infantile dependents, pays them to break up their families and to father bastards, drives both religious virtue and civic virtue out of the public square, discourages both individualism and national unity, and drives the honest poor into dishonest servility, infantilism, infanticide, vice, and, ironically, truculence.

Socialism sets man against wife, father against child, master against servant, worker against boss, race against race and all against all.

Then, having gathered and trained a generation of idle young men to despise self-control, honesty and thrift, and drilled them in race riot psychology, the partial socialist is shocked, shocked, when race riots break out, and the artificially impoverished underclass does not display and self-control, honesty or thrift.

The committed socialist is not shocked, but is delighted, because any revolution, revolt, or violence confirms his ersatz Biblical prophecy yearning for Armageddon and the promised scientifically socialist New Jerusalem beyond.

An aside: Notice that the race riots of recent years broke out in places which never had slavery and never had Jim Crow laws, not in the rural South, but instead break out in places where Democrat politics formed a generation of the youth, in New York, LA, Chicago. The race riots are caused by the relatively mild case of socialism running through the civil immune system of the nation in the 60’s and 70’s, not by the legacy of slavery nor the cruelty of white enormities.

Under socialism, it is not the fortunate or brilliant or hard-working businessman who becomes rich or stays rich, but only whoever is the crony and toad-eater of the commissars and party bosses. So under a generation of socialism the rich are just as barren of self-control, honesty and thrift. These toady capitalists are socialists of the purest ideological purity.

Why are all socialists barbarians?

Simply put, they could not be anything else. Socialism is the psychopathological denial of the law of supply and demand, the scarcity of resources, and a rejection of specialization of labor. It is a denial of economics, of private property, of the link between honest labor and the fair reward freely granted by your grateful neighbors in swap for it.

Socialists are barbarians because socialism is barbarism; or, to be specific, socialism is post-civilizationalism.

Socialism is not the return to the Robert E Howard or Rousseau glamor of lusty and manly barbarism, with its small tribes of troglodytes, Victor Mature and Rachel Welsh in leather swimsuits, living at oneness with nature and dancing with wolves in an ecologically friendly Edenic yet virile existence. Even barbarism, admittedly, has its good side: plenty of healthy outdoor air, for one.

No, socialism is not that and not promising that. It is post-civilization, specifically, the promise that you, the chump, can enjoy the benefits of industrialization and trade without the drawbacks incumbent upon the institution of private property, private land ownership, and the use of money for currency. It is promising civilization without the laws and customs which establish, create, and maintain civilization. It is promising the benefits of specialization of labor without the institutions which allow laborers to specialize.

I am talking about all aspects of this mental disease called socialism. It is a psychopathological fear of the law of supply and demand, a hysterical denial that scarce goods must be economized.

Socialism is an inarticulate harpy-scream of hatred at the nature of reality and at the curse of Adam, which requires men to sweat for their bread. It is a lust for the guillotine, the revolution, the Molotov cocktail. Socialism is hate for the rich and hate for the Kulak and hate for the reactionaries and hate for the Church and hate for other socialists and most of all hate for the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the decent people.

Imagine an iron boot stamping on the face of Sam Gamgee the gardener. Forever.

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

Mr. Wright, your classical liberalism is both honorable and well-known. As one of your co-religionists who is inclined toward “partial socialism” (if I may adopt your term) while at the same time concerned about how welfare does indeed promote illegitimacy and undermine subsidiarity, I haven’t the slightest illusion that with my paltry learning I could dissuade you from your economic views, nor do I wish to hazard the attempt. Instead, in hopes of drawing from you the courage to abandon my partial socialist position, I’d like to put to you a question, which I hope you’ll take as being asked in good faith.

When I picture a classical liberal or laissez faire regime, my mind leaps unbidden to Dickensian squalor–a reaction more of the sentiments than the reason, I admit. I find myself thinking that although I am grateful for the unparallelled growth in the prosperity of the poorest in these last few capitalist centuries (the extent of which was first brought home to my imagination by undergraduate reading of von Mises’ Liberalism, as it happens), I should like to see our citizenry vote to allocate some resources derived from taxation (about the legitimacy of which I won’t argue, for it is beside my point here) to provide a financial floor–perhaps some sort of basic income guarantee as advocated by Milton Friedman, rather than welfare as presently constituted–for the poorest, in order to fend off the deepest depths of squalor. Since I take you to be opposed to such in principle (being in the honorable tradition of opposition to the servile state, as Belloc called it) to such redistributive taxation, I imagine that, other than economic growth itself, you might proffer more vigorous private eleemosynary institutions (the insurance programs of the Knights of Columbus and Catholic hospitals and schools, e.g.) as a method for funding such a financial floor for the poorest in better accord with subsidiarity and fitter for a republic of free men. So, after all that, here is my question: were the present welfare state to be dismantled, what would be the most prudent way for statesmen to manage the transition from the servile state to the subsidiary civil society without having us fall back into Dickensian squalor before the private charities have waxed strong enough to pick up the slack? If you can convince me that private charity can indeed provide such a floor without the coercive apparatus of the state to force fallen men to pay their alms to the poor, I shall be much farther along on the road to abandoning my present partial socialism, and I shall count myself very much more in your debt than I already do as the author of such splendid novels.

It would be one thing if the “coercive apparatus of the state” stopped the poor from sinking to the “deepest depths of squalor”. But it does not. The poorest are still all about us (I’m not talking about the problem of relative poverty (“poor” people with houses, cars and tv’s)). I speak of the actual poorest, who’s wounds of the soul keep them from making proper use of our current very generous government system. As one small example, alcoholics are kept on the road to ruin under our current system. All the money the government gives them goes to booze. More money will not get them out of the gutter, it will kill them faster. This is a flaw all Government charity has, it does not judge. Which is proper for Government, but bad for charity. So I would ask you, given that the “coercive apparatus of the state” has not solved the problem, and given that it has made it measurably worse (compare, for example, the homeless in the Great Depression and the current age), why do you want to keep the current system going? Is not the core rule here “First, do no Harm”?

A man named Henry George noticed the growth of Dickensian squalor in America as industrial progress flourished, and population increased. In the old days of the frontier, there was little luxury, but everyone could find work, everyone worked, and no one starved. As society became richer, some of its members became poorer, and not just drunkards who fathered bastards. Honest men could not find work, and they and their families went hungry. He rejected Malthusianism and Communism, and decided that the problem was land monopoly. An increasing share of GNP went to the ground rents of land, less to wages and the return on capital. Furthermore, speculators kept land out of use in the expectation of future price increases, so people who wanted to work couldn’t find a place to do so. His solution was to abolish taxes on wages, trade, and production, and instead impose a single tax on the value of land. (This is a quick summary of a 571 page book, plus additional history and writings.)

George was denounced as a Communist by the Duke of Argyll and other collectors of land rent, and denounced by Karl Marx for a proposal that would “restore capitalism and set it on a firmer basis than before.” There is an important moral basis for his proposal: People own what they produce by their efforts, but no one produces the land that God created, and when you trace land titles back far enough, they almost always rest on violence: foreign conquest, or civil war and confiscation, or kings’ grants of common land to their supporters and favorites.

Land value taxation has actually had benefits to the extent it has been applied. Again, I don’t have time for the whole story, but you can do some research; begin by Googling on “Henry George” and “land value taxation”. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was a badly blighted city until it turned itself around by taxing land at a much higher ate than buildings. Hong Kong went from poverty to being richer than its colonial overlord Britain, and free market policies are sometimes given credit for this. They deserve some credit, but also, Hong Kong was able to finance its government with low income taxes partly because a large share of revenue came from collecting land tax and rents on government-owned land (people were free to put up buildings on leased land, and had security to own the buildings).

“Honest men could not find work, and they and their families went hungry.”

Since we live in a mixed economy where government intervention in the market is the norm, we tend to think of massive and permanent unemployment as the norm. And yet why is that? What makes it so an able bodies man has nothing to do which can benefit his neighbors and for which his neighbors will pay him? Labor is the one and only component of any good or service which is always needed for any type of production of anything whatsoever. There is nothing to do, not a single ditch to dig or row to hoe or street to sweep?

He rejected Malthusianism and Communism, and decided that the problem was land monopoly.

I also reject Malthusianism and Communism, but I suspect the problem is something far different, particularly since no one person or corporation has every owned all the land. There have been entailments and other legal restrictions on the transfer of property, or laws or uncertainties which make improvement of the land unrewarding, and these I would agree in a just society would be removed from the law.

The tipoff, for anyone observing socialist behavior, should have been their emphasis on consciousness-raising and “getting it.”

They don’t reach their conclusions through a process of logical argumentation — their only use for that is to befuddle their victims and club their enemies.

As far as I can tell, they reach their conclusions in a flash of “insight”, a pivot from one perspective to another. But they can’t explain how or why their current perspective is better than the one they previously occupied or the ones the “unenlightened” are still “clinging to”. They just know it’s hip or cool or whatever the favorite honorific is today.

I just started composing an essay on the very topic of “getting it” – you’re absolutely right. Hegel finished off the revolt against reason by declaring logic an affliction of the little people, like mathematicians and scientists – real thinkers don’t bother with making any sense (See: Science of Logic). What’s left is a twisted form of ontology: one just gets it, after doing what Hegel calls the “hard thinking” – a phrase I have yet to see defined by Hegel – but hey, got a few thousand pages yet to go (I’m hoping to spend a relatively short time in Purgatory).

And so post-moderns, who are neither as smart nor as civilized as Hegel (!) have only one answer to any argument: you just don’t get it! That you would even attempt to use logic and reason about things is decisive proof you are hopelessly unsophisticated – and the wrongest wronger who ever wronged a wrong.

It’s a rapid descent from Hegel’s blustering to Marx’s whiny hatred to Freud’s smug egomania to the lunatic ravings of feminists (the crazy mainstream ones) and what should properly be called racists – people who account for everything as a function of race.

I’ll be watching your blog for that essay, Joseph. If you publish it somewhere else, please be so kind as to drop me a line and let me know where. The epistemology of “getting it” is something that interests me deeply.

Socialism portrays itself as a method of economic organization which protects the poor. Everyone but the cruel and heartless agrees with the notion that helping the poor is a good thing. Indeed, many of us acknowledge a Divine mandate to help the poor. Therefore, socialism has enormous emotional appeal.

Why does it [socialism] lead to rationing, scarcity, poverty, depression, decay of the economy, metastasizing bureaucracy, loss of liberty, and loss of civility and virtue in any place it has been partially implemented?

To establish this causal connection, it would help to have an experimental “control” — that is, a place where socialism has not been even partially implemented. Do you have such a place in mind?

Without such an example, it is far from clear that all of those negatives (loss of civility, etc.) are minimized when the amount of socialism is at exactly zero. It seems at least possible that the optimal amount of socialism is somewhere north of zero.

“To establish this causal connection, it would help to have an experimental “control” — that is, a place where socialism has not been even partially implemented. Do you have such a place in mind?”

Compare East and West Germany, and North and South Korea. Since the people there share a language, history, culture, and so on, and since the only difference is between the degree of socialism, what are your results?

That the former in each case had too much socialism. But that does not establish the claim that the optimal amount of socialism is exactly zero. Some partial socialism may still be better than none. It would be some evidence for this possibility if every advanced country, without exception, has had partial socialism. Are there any exceptions?

If economics depended on the type of pure laboratory experiment you suggest, where an absolute socialism is compared to an absolute libertarianism, no such comparison could be done and no conclusions reached. Since you reached a conclusion, which you listed above, therefore the method you used was not pure laboratory empiricism.

Because of this, I sumbit that your results are not results are all, but interpretive theories you are using to make sense of the data. They do not come from the data, they are being used to make sense of the data. The soundness of the interpretive theory depends solely on its internal consistency for its persuasive power.

Because of this, I sumbit that your results are not results are all, but interpretive theories you are using to make sense of the data. They do not come from the data, they are being used to make sense of the data.

You argue as though the only two possible epistemologies were extreme Empiricism (where all conclusions must be drawn exclusively from the data, with no admixture of prior beliefs or theories) or extreme Coherentism (where we need make only the minimal change to our theories necessary to be logically consistent with the data). Since I know that you don’t believe that these are the only two epistemological options, I am puzzled by your argument.

For my part, I try to hue to a rough and humanly implementable version of Bayesian epistemology. Ideally, I would start with some prior probability distribution over the possibly optimal amounts of socialism. Then, upon encountering empirical evidence, I would update my probability distribution according to Bayes’s formula. It’s not remotely feasible to implement this procedure exactly, but I do what I can to approximate it.

This differs from strict Empiricism because I acknowledge that I start with a prior probability distribution (which includes things like prior beliefs and theoretical frameworks). But Bayesianism also differs from Coherentism because I don’t try to make just the minimal change necessary to be logically consistent with the data. On the contrary, I try to change to whatever is now most probable given the data, which might require a much larger change than I would need to achieve mere logical consistency.

In this case, the relevant evidence includes, on the one hand, the comparative successes of North and South Korea, or of East and West Germany. On the other hand, there is also the nonexistence of any successful nation with zero socialism. Combining such evidences with my prior, I conclude that the optimal amount of socialism is probably less than I would originally have thought, but probably more than zero.

You argue as though the only two possible epistemologies were extreme Empiricism (where all conclusions must be drawn exclusively from the data, with no admixture of prior beliefs or theories) or extreme Coherentism (where we need make only the minimal change to our theories necessary to be logically consistent with the data). Since I know that you don’t believe that these are the only two epistemological options, I am puzzled by your argument.

I would be puzzled by my argument as well, if that were my argument. It is not. It is your extrapolation of my argument to an argument I did not make.

My argument is much simpler: Economics is not an empirical science. Full stop. Empirical data has no bearing on economic arguments. Hence the request for empirical data, or the implication that an economic argument is doubtful if not confirmed by empirical data, is illegitimate.

Bayesian means of interpreting empirical data are more empirical than classical empiricism, which does not pretend to be free of metaphysical assumptions. And so this does not make the question of whether empiricism confirms economics less pertinent, but more. My critique of your question as self-refuting becomes stronger, not weaker, under what seem to be the epistemological assumptions you are using.

“On the other hand, there is also the nonexistence of any successful nation with zero socialism….”

I see I did not make my point clear. Let me use an analogy. Suppose we were debating some other nonempirical question, such as whether murder was justified, and under what conditions. Suppose I were to say that under Anglo-American law and the Christian tradition, killing in self defense was justified, but murder was not.

Suppose again someone using ‘Bayesian’ reasoning were to say, “Ah, but no mainstream society has ever existed where all the killings were in self defense and the murder rate was zero. Therefore we cannot know whether killing in self defense is justified because no nation ever lived up to this rule perfectly.”

The argument is irrelevant. The fact that no society has ever exists which abides perfectly by the rule that killing is self defense is justified and murder is not has no bearing whatsoever on the question.

And, in any case, your definitions are imprecise. Socialism is the specific economic and political theory — albeit technically it is a cult rather than a theory, since it does not explain the phenomena it purports to explain — from the generation of Karl Marx and his predecessors among the French Revolution thinkers. No society before the Eighteenth Century, and no writer before Adam Smith, had a socialist theory of anything, because socialism did not exist.

The cooperative and communal behaviors, the intrusion of the state into the market, the communal ownership of village and guild and tribal property, has, of course, existed since the dawn of man, and these have some elements in common with socialist theory.

Yes, but South Korea and West Germany were both pretty far from laissez-faire minarchies. Mr. McAllister is proposing something like a socialism Laffer Curve. As socialism increases, society benefits, until a maximum is reached; past this maximum, further increases in socialism are detrimental.

Two core problems. One, Mr. McAllister seems to be mixing Government and Socialism, second, he leaves out the controlling factor stopping true “laissez-faire” from being practiced, the Moral axis. We do not let the Democrats sell the babies they have murdered because it is Wrong, not because it harms profit.

Remember that ‘Red States’ are merely those states whose Electoral College votes went to the Republican candidate in the last Presidential election, and ‘Blue States’ are those whose electoral votes went to the Democratic candidate. Every state in the Union has been a ‘Red State’ by that definition at some time in the last 30 years, and nearly every state has been a ‘Blue State’. The division you suggest makes cheap talking points for the media, but corresponds to no lasting reality.

There is no formal definition, but one of the meanings is “Traditionally Republican controlled State” and “Traditionally Democrat controlled State”. Certainly the current economic mess has shown a great divide between the two parties and their ability to run and maintain a functional government. A hard lesson to be sure, especially for the people who believe there’s no difference between the two parties……

There is no formal definition, but one of the meanings is “Traditionally Republican controlled State” and “Traditionally Democrat controlled State”.

The trouble is that these ‘traditions’ are most of them no more than 30 years old, and subject to change at every election. So the informal meaning is useless for a historical study of the kind you describe.

Useless? I think not. Perhaps more imprecise then we would like, but thirty years is a very long time in economics at our current rate of change, both social and technological. It seems quite clear that the Blue models need for control is slowing down if not stopping improvements and investments, to the harm of those they lead. I think it’s as clear as an historical study can be, barring generational ships……

This is because, ultimately, after one says “eat the rich!” one has nothing to say.

Actually, I think the ultimate reason for the Left’s ugliness is their gnosticism, which you’ve mentioned previously. In the Leftist worldview, there is no objective truth or reality. They believe (or rather, they tell themselves) that it’s all social construction all the way down. Hence, according to their worldview, you cannot discover the objective truth through dispassionate reason and then endeavor to live accordingly.

Rather, the truth is “constructed” through the combat of differing “narratives”, where whatever narrative “prevails” (by getting everyone to assent to it) is established as the “truth.” Thus, to a Leftist, establishing their view as the truth is not a matter of reasoned persuasion, but rather of ridicule, scorn, appeal to fraudulent “consensus of everyone who matters,” slander, more scorn, state indoctrination, and (whenever possible) torture and murder of those who refuse to submit and forced reeducation of their loved ones – in short, whatever it takes to coerce those who disagree into assenting to the Leftist’s narrative, or at least pretending to.